Thread: Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)

Here you go...

Using data from the Federal Election Commission, this chart shows all donations that corporate members of the US Business Coalition for TPP made to US Senate campaigns between January and March 2015, when fast-tracking the TPP was being debated in the Senate:

Out of the total $1,148,971 given, an average of $17,676.48 was donated to each of the 65 “yea” votes.

- The average Republican member received $19,673.28 from corporate TPP supporters.

- The average Democrat received $9,689.23 from those same donors.

The amounts given rise dramatically when looking at how much each senator running for re-election received.

Two days before the fast-track vote, Obama was a few votes shy of having the filibuster-proof majority he needed. Ron Wyden and seven other Senate Democrats announced they were on the fence on 12 May, distinguishing themselves from the Senate’s 54 Republicans and handful of Democrats as the votes to sway.

In just 24 hours, Wyden and five of those Democratic holdouts – Michael Bennet of Colorado, Dianne Feinstein of California, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Patty Murray of Washington, and Bill Nelson of Florida – caved and voted for fast-track.

Bennet, Murray, and Wyden – all running for re-election in 2016 – received $105,900 between the three of them. Bennet, who comes from the more purple state of Colorado, got $53,700 in corporate campaign donations between January and March 2015, according to Channing’s research.

Almost 100% of the Republicans in the US Senate voted for fast-track – the only two non-votes on TPA were a Republican from Louisiana and a Republican from Alaska.
Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who is the former US trade representative, has been one of the loudest proponents of the TPP. (In a comment to the Guardian Portman’s office said: “Senator Portman is not a vocal proponent of TPP - he has said it’s still being negotiated and if and when an agreement is reached he will review it carefully.”) He received $119,700 from 14 different corporations between January and March, most of which comes from donations from Goldman Sachs ($70,600), Pfizer ($15,700), and Procter & Gamble ($12,900). Portman is expected to run against former Ohio governor Ted Strickland in 2016 in one of the most politically competitive states in the country.

Seven Republicans who voted “yea” to fast-track and are also running for re-election next year cleaned up between January and March. Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia received $102,500 in corporate contributions. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, best known for proposing a Monsanto-written bill in 2013 that became known as the Monsanto Protection Act, received $77,900 – $13,500 of which came from Monsanto.
Arizona senator and former presidential candidate John McCain received $51,700 in the first quarter of 2015. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina received $60,000 in corporate donations. Eighty-one-year-old senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who is running for his seventh Senate term, received $35,000. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who will be running for his first full six-year term in 2016, received $67,500 from pro-TPP corporations.

“It’s a rare thing for members of Congress to go against the money these days,” said Mansur Gidfar, spokesman for the anti-corruption group Represent.Us. “They know exactly which special interests they need to keep happy if they want to fund their reelection campaigns or secure a future job as a lobbyist.

“How can we expect politicians who routinely receive campaign money, lucrative job offers, and lavish gifts from special interests to make impartial decisions that directly affect those same special interests?” Gidfar said. “As long as this kind of transparently corrupt behavior remains legal, we won’t have a government that truly represents the people.”

Link

This is succinct.

Note the Tribunals that are outside of the courts, and there decisions are legally binding.

Originally Posted by Black Heart

they were told the Department of Defense would give them serious consideration for a contract to outfit recruits with athletic shoes.

Is it mandatory that Ameristani Government departments only purchase Ameristani manufactured goods? Or can the POTUSE sign an exclusion/Presidential order, at his whim, or more probably to whoever writes the largest cheque to his Nevada Offshore account?

It's been a while since we've heard about the TPP. It seems that more and more Democrats are coming out against it and some Repubs are against it. The "pass" votes are likely ahead, but will it be ratified? It's not a 100% possibility.

There's Only a Slim Chance TPP Will Be Ratified This Year

COMMENTARY by Alan Wolff MAY 5, 2016,

The United States signed the deal at the end of last year, but still needs to implement it, which requires Congressional action. If it does not ratify, America will have defaulted on its promise to 11 trading partners who also signed the deal, and to the more than half dozen other countries that have expressed an interest in joining. So the question is: When can the agreement receive Congressional action? Not in the run-up to the election when Congress is focusing solely on that career-determining event, but afterwards, possibly during the post-election session.

The bottom line: The next president of the United States is not going to send the current agreement to Congress in its current form. It might take years to get to a new agreement, were that even possible, and that would be a long shot.

There's Only a Slim Chance TPP Will Be Ratified This Year - Fortune

Bumping this thread b/c it's very relevant to President-elect Trump is dropping it for the US.

Some good articles and visual pieces.

Please continue the discussion.

An Op-Ed piece from the Huffington Post[/I]

How to Tell TPP Is a Bad Deal
01/05/2016 09:33 am ET | Updated Jan 05, 2016
150

Stan Sorscher
Labor Representative, Society for Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace

How do you tell if the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a good deal or a bad one?

Consider the recent climate summit agreement in Paris. Nearly 200 countries negotiated the deal, more or less in public for the world to see.

All signatory countries wanted a sustainable planet where their citizens could prosper.

The climate change deal in Paris is not air-tight. Still, it is a significant political, social and moral commitment by leaders of most countries in the world to do better.

TPP defines bad rules for globalization. It sets up skewed power relationships for dealing with climate change, inequality and many other important public policies.

2016-01-05

Labor and environment show how power relationships work in trade deals.

Going back to NAFTA, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) enforces labor and environmental provisions in trade deals. The U.S.-Peru trade agreement was a high point in language for environmental protections. However, the World Bank estimates that 80% of logging in Peru is Illegal. The USTR has never enforced environmental protections in Peru or anywhere else.

What about labor? First, what ARE the labor protections? No child labor, no forced labor, the right to form unions, no discrimination for religion, race, country of birth. By modern standards, we take these basic human rights for granted. Didn’t we win these fights generations ago?

We have trade deals with Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Peru, where labor standards are at the level of life-and-death. Guatemala is arguably the most dangerous country in the world for labor leaders. Violence against workers in Colombia is still common.

Last year, a jaw-dropping and sobering performance from our negotiators lowered trust in the USTR close to zero.

On May 8, 2015, President Obama spoke at Nike in Oregon about labor rights. Irony aside, the speech was eloquent and inspiring.

And if Vietnam, or any of the other countries in this trade agreement don’t meet these requirements, they’ll face meaningful consequences. ... If you’re a country that wants in to this agreement, you have to meet higher standards. If you don’t, you’re out. If you break the rules, there are actual repercussions.

Four days later, the Senate approved language saying that all countries in any new trade agreement must meet basic standards for human trafficking. As it happens, six of the 12 TPP countries have serious problems with human trafficking. Of the six, only Malaysia failed to meet the Senate’s standard for inclusion in TPP.

Two weeks after the Senate vote, shocking press reports from Malaysia described mass graves, bodies showing signs of torture and 28 camps where refugees were held in pens for human trafficking. This was the second large-scale discovery of mass graves on the Thai-Malaysia border that month. More reports followed.

The Prime Minister of Malaysia is suspected of corruption in a $700 million investigation in the U.S. and other countries. Official corruption extends into human trafficking and jungle camps.

The USTR and Obama administration could have put meaning into the President’s lofty promise at Nike. They could have said, “Malaysia is out of TPP. When Malaysia deals effectively with human trafficking, they can dock into TPP like any other country.”

Instead, on July 27, the official U.S. government upgraded its ranking of Malaysia regarding human trafficking, without explanation or justification. Presto! Malaysia is qualified to stay in the TPP.

Reuters reported that political pressure inside the State Department evaluation process pushed up Malaysia’s score.

President Obama’s eloquence at Nike will be cold comfort to Rohingya refugees in Malaysia and Thailand who are sold from one human trafficker to another. Similar glowing promises for labor standards, going back to Gerald Ford, are lost on the families of murdered labor leaders in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Peru.

The power relationships in TPP will be great for factories in Vietnam, where 90,000 workers make Nike’s shoes. TPP will be great for Hewlett-Packard, Intel, AMD, Dell, Apple and other electronics producers, who use components from Malaysia, where 28% of workers in the electronics industry are subject to forced labor. Producers of palm oil, textiles, and garments in Malaysia can continue to use child labor.

Thailand and Indonesia want to join TPP, alongside reports of official complicity in 21st century slavery in their fishing industries.

It’s clear that the Obama administration has no real interest in enforcing labor or environmental laws. It’s shameful to promise 21st century standards, then accept conditions in Malaysia, Vietnam, Colombia, Peru, Guatemala, and Brunei as global norms.

So, what is the difference between the Paris Climate Summit and TPP?

In 2014, over 300,000 environmentalists marched in New York City to make the case that climate change was a top priority. In Berlin, 250,000 Europeans sent the same message, leading up to the Paris summit. Pope Francis made climate change a moral issue. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calls climate change the defining issue of our time.

Significantly, China is racing to capture wind and solar energy. Developing countries see energy policy as their must-have connection to future prosperity.

A generation of voters and activists followed the open public process for negotiating the Paris agreement. They could see themselves and their interests reflected in the deal.

Inequality is another overriding global issue. President Obama made inequality a defining challenge of our time.

As we take on climate change and income inequality as global issues, we see that TPP is worse than a step in the wrong direction. TPP locks in toxic power relationships that will block positive change for a generation or two.

TPP was negotiated in secret, keeping civil society at arms length. TPP clearly reflects interests of global investors, defining a version of globalization “of, by, and for the 1%.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said we should start over with a new paradigm for trade policy. She and many others would support a deal that does as much for workers and the environment as it does for global investors. That’s exactly what we should do.

How to Tell TPP Is a Bad Deal | The Huffington Post

^ As usual very shallow reporting there.

It didn't take some of the Pacific rim countries to sign up to the inclusive, public knowledge alternatives being promoted by China.

More conspiracy theory garbage from spent left-wing pseudo-intellectuals. Noam Chomsky - really?! Is there anything he's not an expert on?!

It seems curious that those who espouse the fabness of supranational institutions, balk at the notion of the fabness of supranational corporations. ¬¬

Surely both are equally exploitative unaccountable distant and sinister forces enabling a powerful elite? It's like a turfwar between two rival mafias (or religions).

Whether it's corporate authoritarianism from commercial organisations or corporate authoritarianism from political (or supranational) organisations, it's all screwing the little people, and disenfranchising them - how much more powerful is your vote at the ballotbox than your vote at the cash register? Surely they are two cheeks of the same arse?

The big issue of the time is subsidiarity (or the lack thereof) and the rejection of distant unaccountable anational (as in amoral) elites. This also has implications for global pollution and anthopomorphic climate change and future peace and prosperity.

Originally Posted by OhOh

It didn't take some of the Pacific rim countries to sign up to the inclusive, public knowledge alternatives being promoted by China.

I think you're missing the word....."long."

Thanks for reading my comment, sometimes I get so sad when they are ignored.

Mr. President has delivered on one issue.


"US President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order to officially withdraw US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal.

Trump called the move "a great thing for the American workers", local media reported. "We've been talking about this for a long time," Trump said as he signed the order."

Trump signs executive order to withdraw US from TPP - Global Times



Cutting the waste of time and energy spent at a stroke. I wonder if ameristan will refund all the ¥ spent by the countries blackmailed to "sign".

Another bitter taste for the vassals to swallow.

Mr. President has delivered on one issue.


"US President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order to officially withdraw US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal.

Trump called the move "a great thing for the American workers", local media reported. "We've been talking about this for a long time," Trump said as he signed the order."

Trump signs executive order to withdraw US from TPP - Global Times



Cutting the waste of time and energy spent at a stroke. I wonder if ameristan will refund all the ¥ spent by the countries blackmailed to "sign".

Another bitter taste for the vassals to swallow.

A lot of the rabid anti-TPP folks in NZ were also big anti-Trump vocalists.

They're prolly now quite befuddled with this outcome and don't know how to react.

Originally Posted by OhOh

Trump signs executive order to withdraw US from TPP - Global Times Cutting the waste of time and energy spent at a stroke. I wonder if ameristan will refund all the ¥ spent by the countries blackmailed to "sign".

I was hoping to see an accounting of the blackmail you are talking about in your link but, alas, we'll just have to take your word.

Item one, you will not be able to express your view on the secret documents until you sign and pass legislation in your country.

Ameristan democracy at its best.

This is a very good summary of TPP, with Sanders referring specific quotes and statistics by Bill Clinton, Heritage Foundation, the Cato institute, etc. PNTR with China and CAFTA-DR.